My Personal Walk Back Through Time

Even though this whole blogging about my ancestors is new, I've been on this journey for awhile, having started in the late 1980s / early 1990s. When I first began this journey, I had 3 goals in mind:

1. To find out if the stories I had always heard about my maternal grandmother's lineage were true. One of the stories handed down was that one of my great-great grandmothers was white and the other was half White / half Indian. Now the half White / half Indian could possibly have happened but in my mind there was just no way the other could have happened in Georgia during the slavery era.
2. To find out anything I could about the paternal side of my family. Unlike my mother's side of the family, there were no stories handed down. It was like my dad, my aunt's and my uncles went immediately from being babies to adults.
3. To try to reconnect with the various branches of the family that have been lost along the way.

But truth be told, this has been more about a personal journey more than anything. As an African-American (personally I'm of the generation that prefers the term Black but will use AA in this instance), it's often said "You can't know where you are going until you know where you have been." And so, as I travel further and further back in time, I continue to grow, to try to understand, to ask why, and to thank my ancestors for their strength, perseverance, and their hope for a brighter tomorrow, if not for themselves, then for their descendants. I realized long ago if my ancestors had not managed to hang on, there would be no me. They are my history.